I received my undergraduate degree - a BA in English literature - in May of 1976. I was not a brilliant student. Duquesne University was too big and overwhelming for me. I was probably a student who would have benefitted from a year off between high school and college. I just wasn't ready.
I came from a low-income family. My father, a college graduate, had died when I was 15, and my experiences were more like those of first-generation college students. I had a horrible bout of depression my junior year, which caused me to get fired from my work study job - ironically, in the campus office that provided counseling.
But in spite of all that, I had a much simpler and easier time in college than my students do.
Because I encourage personal writing in my composition courses and I teach memoir writing, I probably know more about my students than most of my colleagues. I know which one was raped at 12, which one was beaten and locked in a closet by her father, which one's father came out as gay and left his family of six children and a bewildered wife.
My students are mostly first-generation college students. They are either very rural West Virginians or very urban inner-city athletes. The are from low socio-economic families and come unprepared from underperforming K-12 systems.
They are frequently from one parent homes, or raised by their grandparents. There is alcoholism, drug addiction, and jail in their backgrounds.
These are the students who deserve the best teachers, the most dedicated and knowledgable. They need programs like music and foreign language and ancient philosophies - the courses most frequently cut by public colleges and universities but remain a source of pride in elite universities.
Our approach to education at all levels is just wrong. Like corporations and individuals, for colleges, the rich get rich and the poor get poorer. And there's nothing surer than this: The current system will increase the ever-increasing divide between rich and poor and head us for destruction or revolution.
Or both.
Sounds 99% like my students and we struggle to adapt to the world of academia as well as (re)learning basic high school English concepts. I often feel overwhelmed by the task; I struggle to reach them, connect with them, make them care about themselves and their futures. Every generation of first-year students seem to get worse...but new president's new recruiting efforts have managed to bring in a cohort that's a step up from the recent past. Now the shackles of a woefully traditional pedagogy need to be lifted from the English department so we can actually do what works best...or at least better.
ReplyDeleteGood profile of my students too. These intense stories are not so uncommon. Two stand out from the art school days: the beautiful young lady whose dad murdered her mom, leaving her to raise her brother and the young girl who spent years in a refugee camp in the former Yugoslavia. I'd like to think these students are also my teachers in compassion.
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